eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

October 2012

10/28/2012

Aristotle’s
classic
text on Ethics begins with a question about the purpose of life. For him, the
ultimate purpose is human happiness. (A theistic approach to the same question
might be that the purpose of human life is to glorify God and that our own
happiness may be secondary if not incidental.) Immanuel Kant will take the
later position when he argues that the goal of life is to become worthy of
happiness.

Here are the principle passages from Aristotle’s
Ethics on the matter of happiness as the end goal of our life.

Aristotle
on the Pursuit of Happiness: “What then is the Chief Good in
each? Is it not "that for the sake of which the other things are
done?" and this in the healing art is health, and in the art military
victory, and in that of house-building a house, and in any other thing
something else; in short, in every action and moral choice the End, because in
all cases men do everything else with a view to this.”

“Now since the ends are plainly many, and of
these we choose some with a view to others (wealth, for instance, musical
instruments, and, in general, all instruments), it is clear that all are not
final: but the Chief Good is manifestly something final; and so, if there is
some one only which is final, this must be the object of our search: but if
several, then the most final of them will be it.”

“And of this nature
Happiness is mostly thought to be, for this we choose always for its own sake,
and never with a view to anything further: whereas honour, pleasure, intellect,
in fact every excellence we choose for their own sakes, it is true (because we
would choose each of these even if no result were to follow), but we choose
them also with a view to happiness, conceiving that through their
instrumentality we shall be happy: but no man chooses happiness with a view to them,
nor in fact with a view to any other thing whatsoever.”

“So then Happiness is
manifestly something final and self-sufficient, being the end of all things
which are and may be done.”

” Solon perhaps drew a
fair picture of the Happy, when he said that they are men moderately supplied
with external goods, and who have achieved the most noble deeds, as he thought,
and who have lived with perfect self-mastery: for it is quite possible for men
of moderate means to act as they ought."

For Aristotle, a man’s happiness will be the
consequence of virtue (combined with at least some moderate success in materially
providing for himself). That is, once a man (or woman) has achieved a secure living
wage, most of his happiness will depend on his or her character or virtue
within a civil society. Some of his happiness, he will later argue, will be the
consequence of his or her ability to form a few (and if not a few than at least
one) solid friendship but these too are based on the possession of virtue. The
development of virtue (or character) then becomes the principle
topic of his discourse. And what he says about it is interesting: Character (or
virtue) he argues, is the result of our decision to make virtuous choices
before we may feel virtuous. Here are the principle passages of this argument:

Aristotle
on the Origins of Virtue (Character): “From this fact it
is plain that not one of the Moral Virtues comes to be in us merely by nature.”

“Again, in whatever
cases we get things by nature, we get the faculties first and perform the acts
of working afterwards; an illustration of which is afforded by the case of our
bodily senses, for it was not from having often seen or heard that we got these
senses, but just the reverse: we had them and so exercised them, but did not
have them because we had exercised them. But the Virtues we get by first
performing single acts of working,”

“Men come to be
builders, for instance, by building; harp-players, by playing on the harp:
exactly so, by doing just actions we come to be just; by doing the actions of
self-mastery we come to be perfected in self-mastery; and by doing brave
actions brave.”

“Again, every Virtue is
either produced or destroyed from and by the very same circumstances: art too
in like manner; I mean it is by playing the harp that both the good and the bad
harp-players are formed: and similarly builders and all the rest; by building
well men will become good builders; by doing it badly bad ones:”

“So too then is it with
the Virtues: for by acting in the various relations in which we are thrown with
our fellow men, we come to be, some just, some unjust: and by acting in
dangerous positions and being habituated to feel fear or confidence, we come to
be, some brave, others cowards.”

“As Evenus says,
"Practice, I say, my friend, doth long endure, And at the last is even
very nature."

Joshua Chamberlain, a professor of Aristotle at
Bowdoin College and subsequently the famous officer in charge of defending
Little Round Top at Gettysburg, explained Aristotle’s position on virtue quite
well when he gave a dedication speech at Gettysburg many years later.

“We know not of the
future, and cannot plan for it much. But we can hold our spirits and our bodies
so pure and high, we may cherish such thoughts and such ideals, and dream such
dreams of lofty purpose, that we can determine and know what manner of men we
will be whenever and wherever the hour strikes, that calls to noble action,
this predestination God has given us in charge. No man becomes suddenly
different from his habit and cherished thought. We carry our accustomed manners
with us. And it was the boyhood you brought from your homes which made you men;
which braced your hearts, which shone upon your foreheads, which held you
steadfast in mind and body, and lifted these heights of Gettysburg to immortal
glory."

In other words, the bravery that was shown at the
battle for Little Round Top was not born that day. Nor was it born when the men
fighting were born. It was brought into being over the course of entire
childhoods. It was the result of boys making bravery a habit over entire
lifetimes.

At this point in time in Aristotle’s argument, he
addresses the specific question “What are the virtues that we should aim to
attain through practice? How do we know what character qualities we should
endeavor to cultivate. His answer in short: Find the mean between the extremes.
Here are the passages that convey his
principle argument:

Aristotle
on finding Virtue in the “mean”: “First then this must
be noted, that it is the nature of such things to be spoiled by defect and
excess; as we see in the case of health and strength (since for the
illustration of things which cannot be seen we must use those that can), for
excessive training impairs the strength as well as deficient: meat and drink,
in like manner, in too great or too small quantities, impair the health: while
in due proportion they cause, increase, and preserve it. Thus it is therefore
with the habits of perfected Self-Mastery and Courage and the rest of the
Virtues: for the man who flies from and fears all things, and never stands up
against anything, comes to be a coward; and he who fears nothing, but goes at
everything, comes to be rash. In like manner too, he that tastes of every
pleasure and abstains from none comes to lose all self-control; while he who
avoids all, as do the dull and clownish, comes as it were to lose his faculties
of perception: that is to say, the habits of perfected Self-Mastery and Courage
are spoiled by the excess and defect, but by the mean state are preserved.”

"Men may be bad in
many ways, But good in one alone." Virtue then is "a state apt to
exercise deliberate choice, being in the relative mean, determined by reason,
and as the man of practical wisdom would determine." It is a middle state
between too faulty ones, in the way of excess on one side and of defect on the
other: and it is so moreover, because the faulty states on one side fall short
of, and those on the other exceed, what is right, both in the case of the
feelings and the actions; but Virtue finds, and when found adopts, the mean.
And so, viewing it in respect of its essence and definition, Virtue is a mean
state; but in reference to the chief good and to excellence it is the highest
state possible.”

“In respect of giving
and taking wealth (a): The mean state is Liberality, the excess Prodigality,
the defect Stinginess:”

“Now as there are three
states in each case, two faulty either in the way of excess or defect, and one
right, which is the mean state.”

“And so it is hard to
be good: for surely hard it is in each instance to find the mean, just as to
find the mean point or center of a circle is not what any man can do, but only
he who knows how: just so to be angry, to give money, and be expensive, is what
any man can do, and easy: but to do these to the right person, in due
proportion, at the right time, with a right object, and in the right manner,
this is not as before what any man can do, nor is it easy; and for this cause
goodness is rare, and praiseworthy, and noble.”

“It is not easy, for
instance, to determine exactly in what manner, with what persons, for what
causes, and for what length of time, one ought to feel anger:

“Then, again, he who
makes a small deflection from what is right, be it on the side of too much or
too little, is not blamed, only he who makes a considerable one; for he cannot
escape observation. But to what point or degree a man must err inorder to incur
blame, it is not easy to determine exactly in words: nor in fact any of those
points which are matter of perception by the Moral Sense: such questions are
matters of detail, and the decision of them rests with the Moral Sense.”

“As for the excess, it
occurs in all forms; men are angry with those with whom, and at things with
which, they ought not to be, and more than they ought, and too hastily, and for
too great a length of time.”

A simple way to understand this concept is to try to
look at any virtue as a middle position between extremes. What, for example,
are the extremes lying to the left and right of generosity? Of tolerance? Of
courage? Of persistence? etc. Aristotle’s
ethics are born of this reasoning process. But they do not end with a reasoning
process. Aristotle of somewhat critical of Socrates and Plato I think because
he sees them as content with a life arguing over the definition of virtue. Aristotle
would agree with the Apostle Paul’s criticism of the legalists when he writes
in Romans,

“If
you rely on the law and boast in God;if
you know his will and approve of what is superior because you are instructed by
the law;if you are convinced that you are a guide for
the blind, a light for those who are in the dark,an
instructor of the foolish, a teacher of little children, because you have in
the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth—you, then, who teach
others, do you not teach yourself? You who preach against stealing, do you
steal? You who say that
people should not commit adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols,
do you rob temples?”

Here are a few passages that capture the essence of
Aristotle’s view of Ethics as a more than a “spectator sport:”

Aristotle
on Ethics, Reason, and the Will: “Since then the object
of the present treatise is not mere speculation, as it is of some others (for
we are inquiring not merely that we may know what virtue is but that we may
become virtuous, else it would have been useless), we must consider as to the
particular actions how we are to do them, because, as we have just said, the
quality of the habits that shall be formed depends on these.”

“Must we not rather acknowledge, what is
commonly said, that in matters of moral action mere Speculation and Knowledge
is not the real End but rather Practice: and if so, then neither in respect of
Virtue is Knowledge enough; we must further strive to have and exert it, and
take whatever other means there are of becoming good.”

Clearly, Paul is thinking with Aristotelian logic
when he discusses the problem of sin in Romans. Here is what Paul says there
about the subject. Here is Aristotle:

“And there seems to be
another Irrational Nature of the Soul, which yet in a way partakes of Reason.
For in the man who controls his appetites, and in him who resolves to do so and
fails, we praise the Reason or Rational part of the Soul, because it exhorts
aright and to the best course: but clearly there is in them, beside the Reason,
some other natural principle which fights with and strains against the Reason.
(For in plain terms, just as paralysed limbs of the body when their owners
would move them to the right are borne aside in a contrary direction to the
left, so is it in the case of the Soul”

Here is Paul:

“I do not understand what I do.
For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree
that the law is good. As
it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself
does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature.
For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.
For I do not do the good I want to do,
but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no
longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

So I find
this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me.
For in my inner being I delight in God’s
law; but
I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and
making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.”

I will conclude my discussion of Aristotle’s Ethicswith a look at what Aristotle has to say about friendships for
along with the development of character, no man or woman finds happiness in
life without them. As with his argument on virtue, Aristotle aims for middle
ground. One can have too many friends just as easily as one can have too few.
The secret is to have quality in the friends one can reasonably sustain. Here are
the principle passages:

Aristotle
on Friendship: “Again, it is perhaps absurd to make
our Happy man a solitary, because no man would choose the possession of all
goods in the world on the condition of solitariness, man being a social animal
and formed by nature for living with others:”

“To be a friend to many
people, in the way of the perfect Friendship, is not possible; just as you
cannot be in love with many at once:”

“Between Husband and
Wife there is thought to be Friendship by a law of nature: man being by nature
disposed to pair, more than to associate in Communities: in proportion as the
family is prior in order of time and more absolutely necessary than the
Community.”

“Of friends likewise there is a limited
number, which perhaps may be laid down to be the greatest number with whom it
would be possible to keep up intimacy; this being thought to be one of the
greatest marks of Friendship, and it being quite obvious that it is not
possible to be intimate with many, in other words, to part one’s self among
many. And besides it must be remembered that they also are to be friends to one
another if they are all to live together: but it is a matter of difficulty to
find this in many men at once. It comes likewise to be difficult to bring home
to one’s self the joys and sorrows of many: because in all probability one
would have to sympathise at the same time with the joys of this one and the
sorrows of that other. Perhaps then it is well not to ndeavor to have very many
friends but so many as are enough for intimacy: because, in fact, it would seem
not to be possible to be very much a friend to many at the same time: and, for
the same reason, not to be in love with many objects at the same time: love
being a kind of excessive Friendship which implies but one object: and all
strong emotions must be limited in the number towards whom they are felt. And
if we look to facts this seems to be so: for not many at a time become friends
in the way of companionship, all the famous Friendships of the kind are between
two persons: whereas they who have many friends, and meet everybody on the
footing of intimacy, seem to be friends really to no one except in the way of
general society;”

For Aristotle, one should be careful not to
overburden one’s friends with cares and sorrows. I wonder if you would agree
with him?

“And for this reason
they who are of a manly nature are cautious not to implicate their friends in
their pain; and unless a man is exceedingly callous to the pain of others he
cannot bear the pain which is thus caused to his friends: in short, he does not
admit men to wail with him, not being given to wail at all: women, it is true, and
men who resemble women, like to have others to groan with them, and love such
as friends and sympathisers. But it is plain that it is our duty in all things
to imitate the highest character.”

For Aristotle, friendships should not be maintained
beyond the point when they remain reciprocal. I wonder if you would agree with him?

“A question is also
raised as to the propriety of dissolving or not dissolving those Friendships
the parties to which do not remain what they were when the connection was
formed.”

Question
for Comment: What virtues do you most wish to
cultivate and to what extent does your happiness depend on your doing so? What
part do your friends play in helping you to develop those virtues and have you
thanked them lately for playing that role?

10/21/2012

“The
scenes on this field would have cured anybody of war.” - William Tecumseh Sherman

“I will tell
you something about stories, … They aren’t just entertainment. Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.” - L. M.
Silko, Ceremony

This is a book for soldiers, officers, voters,
literature teachers, historians, trauma survivors, and the people who try to
understand and help them.

Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist who deals with the
Post Traumatic Stress Disorders of Vietnam veterans, has written this classic
to help a reader of TheIlliad understand what Homer is talking
about and to help a victim of trauma to understand an ancient piece of
literature.

Shay uses this classic piece of narrative to help
real people understand real people. “At
its worst our educational system produces counselors, psychiatrists,
psychologists, and therapists,” he writes,

“who resemble
museum-goers whose whole experience consists of mentally saying, “That’s
cubist! … That’s El Greco!” and who never see anything they’ve looked at. “Just
listen!” say the veterans when telling mental health professionals what they
need to know to work with them, and I believe that is their wish for the
general public as well.”

Achilles
in Vietnam is a treatment of the subject of trauma by a man
who has obviously listened. Using Homer’s The
Illiad Shay answers questions about soldiers, war, and trauma; What causes
a soldier to lose his moral compass? What are the causes of PTSD and what
exacerbates it or brings healing to those who have it? What can we learn from
war trauma to help us deal with our own traumas in life?

Shay frames the story of Achilles in Troy as a story
of a man psychologically damaged by his traumatic losses. “I have argued that the Iliad is the tragedy
of Achilles’ noble character brought to ruin,” he writes,

“— moral ruin in his
own terms. . . . prior to Agamémnon’s betrayal of “what’s right” and the death
of Pátroklos, Achilles possessed a highly developed social morality. This was
reflected in his care for the welfare of other Greek soldiers, respect for
enemies living and dead, and a reluctance to kill prisoners. Achilles’ moral
unluckiness, his tragedy, was that events— simply what happened— created the
desire to do things that he himself regarded as bad.”

Shay talks about how injustices experienced by
Achilles at the hands of his superiors are combined with devastating losses of
his closest comrades to place him in a state of severe psychological brokenness.
As he puts it, Achilles “social horizon shrinks” – that is the circle of people
that he no longer cares to regard as people is reduced to no-one. “Initially,
Achilles’ horizon shrinks from the whole Greek army (1: 63) to his own troop,
the Myrmidons,” we read, “As wrath festers, his field of moral vision and
emotional responsiveness shrinks further to just one man, his foster brother,
Pátroklos (23: 105). “Achilles loses his humanity in two stages,” Shay writes,

“He ceases to care
about his fellow Greeks after betrayal by his commander, and then he loses all
compassion for any human being after the death of Pátroklos. The Iliad is the
story of the undoing of Achilles’ character.”

The author spends a chapter or two weaving in
interviews with Vietnam veterans to help better understand how this happens. “It
was constant now,” one veteran reports of his loss of humanitarian concern for
life, “I was watching the other five guys like they was my children. … It
wasn’t seventy-two guys [in the company] I was worried about. It was five guys.”
“His social horizon,” says Shays, “in the midst of lethal dangers to them all,
has contracted to this small circle of comrades.”

In a subsequent chapter, Achilles in Vietnam addresses the question of why it is that some
soldiers “went berserk.” [Note: The word beserk
is the Norse word for “bear shirt” and describes the practice of some Norse
warriors who would go into battle without any armor besides a bear skin (or no
covering at all). It is a state of blind rage accompanied by a total lack of
concern for one’s own safety – almost as though one had determined that
craziness was as good as Kevlar.]

Shay is convinced that these states of violent
vengeful insanity such as Achilles experiences when he drags Hector’s body
around the walls of Troy for three days, are the consequence of deep
psychological wounds to a person’s sense of justice, meaning, and perception. Combat, he says, is essentially a form of
torture in which a soldier is imprisoned in a narrow violent place between a
force that will shoot him if he goes forward and banish him if he retreats. “The
front line is thus a narrow zone of fear and death lying between two prisons,”
he writes.

PTSD is unavoidable in such a place of violence and
carnage but it damages the soul when the experience itself – the very order to
go there and experience it - violates a person’s sense of a just world. “When a
leader destroys the legitimacy of the army’s moral order by betraying “what’s
right,” says Shays, “he inflicts manifold injuries on his men. The Iliad is a
story of these immediate and devastating consequences.”

“This is the
possibility, as Brown University Professor Martha Nussbaum declares, that
social betrayal can undermine our very humanity: “Annihilation of convention
[Homer’s thémis] by another’s acts can destroy … stable character…. It can,
quite simply, produce bestiality, the utter loss of human relatedness.”

The great tragedy of Vietnam, Shay argues, is that
soldiers were not given adequate opportunity to “communalize” their grief. They
were brought in as individuals and they were sent back as individuals. Units
who experienced the same traumas were not retained as units when they left
Vietnam so that they could console each other for their shared losses. What
Shay says about the “thwarted” grief-work of Vietnam vets is no less true about
non-combatants who experience violent traumas in life.

“Any blow in life will
have longer-lasting and more serious consequences if there is no opportunity to
communalize it. This means some mix of formal social ceremony and informal
telling of the story with feeling to socially connected others who do not let
the survivor go through it alone. The virtual suppression of social griefwork
in Vietnam contrasts vividly with the powerful expressions of communal mourning
recorded in Homeric epic. I believe that numerous military, cultural,
institutional, and historical factors conspired to thwart the griefwork of
Vietnam combat veterans, and I believe that this matters. The emergence of rage
out of intense grief may be a human universal; long-term obstruction of grief
and failure to communalize grief can imprison a person in endless swinging
between rage and emotional deadness as a permanent way of being in the world.

“. . . I believe that
the emergence of rage out of intense grief is a biological universal and that
long-term obstruction of grief and failure to communalize grief can lock a person
into chronic rage. . . .

“Thwarted,
uncommunalized grief is a major reason why there are so many severe, long-term
psychological injuries from the Vietnam War.”

One of the more fascinating aspects of Achilles in Vietnam is the discussion
that Shay initiates on the subject of religion. He makes an interesting argument
that the Greeks did not have high moral expectations of their gods and thus,
the experience of fickle fortune in war did not shatter their sense of the
world. In many respects, the violence and haphazard fortunes of combat soldiers
makes more “sense” when interpreted as the Greeks would have. In Vietnam, many
soldiers had grown up with perceptions of the world and the justice of the
creator and controller of it that could not (or did not) conform to the
realities they experienced. In Vietnam, people who gave their lives for others
were not resurrected. In Vietnam, the saints were not protected from “the lions
den” or the furnace. “God as viewed by Christians, Jews, and Moslems also has
the power to save, protect, and resurrect—“ writes Shay, “and when He does not,
He violates the covenant many thought had been passed down to them in religious
instruction.”

“As we have seen, both
American soldiers in Vietnam and Greek soldiers at Troy sometimes made God (or
a god) the target for attribution of causality, responsibility, and blame.
However, even when the attribution was the same, the emotional meaning for the
soldier was often very different. American soldiers felt betrayed, abandoned by
God; they became spiritual orphans. The Homeric warrior was not orphaned when
he saw a god against him; he might be terrified, but he wasn’t devalued or
dropped into the void.”

As Shay notes, a Greek soldier who believed himself
to be ill-treated by a god (for whatever petty reason the god had) at least had
some other petty god that he could try to manipulate into applying supernatural
power in some counterstrike.

“Gods were multiple, so
a Greek or Trojan could hope that the enmity of one god might be offset by the
favor of another. Homer’s soldiers spent effort and wealth courting divine
favor— prayers and sacrifices abound— but they did not expect gods to be other
than what they were: powerful, self-centered, arbitrary, unpredictable,
heartless, and cruel. Many American veterans still languish in the following
demoralizing logic: A positive relationship to God is the foundation of
personal value; defeat by the Vietnamese meant that God was against Americans;
therefore, I am valueless.”

“One veteran in our
program wrote flatly, “Any God that allows what happened in the ’Nam I want
nothing to do with.” Many Vietnam combat veterans lost both a sense of meaning
and a sense of their own value when they felt cut off from God.”

“Homeric soldiers
appear to have been better off in two regards. . . . Since it was still
possible in Homeric culture to speak of gods as cruel, crooked, or heartless,
it’s not surprising that the characters in the Iliad expect less of them.
Second, there was more than one game in town. Apollo might be against you, but
Athêna could be on your side, or you might be out of favor with Poseidon but in
favor with Arês. God’s love for humankind is one of our present culture’s all-pervasive,
invisible, unquestioned, and thus unconscious assumptions. When war shattered
this assumption, American soldiers in Vietnam lost a sustaining idea. For some,
this loss was devastating. The veterans most devastated have had the hardest
time rebuilding a personally meaningful world view.”

Another interesting argument that Shay makes is that
there is a direct comparison between the way that many combat veterans in
Vietnam saw rear echelon commanding officers and the way the Greeks saw their
gods. “Vietnam combat veterans’ picture of higher-echelon military and political
authorities is not pretty,” he writes,

“The terms heartless,
crooked, shallow, and self-indulgent constitute a quick portrait of the REMF,
but each of these has numerous subheadings and illustrations. The traits in
this portrait of the REMF are shown in the Iliad as characteristics of gods.”

In other words, both the soldiers of Greece in the
Trojan War and American soldiers in Vietnam saw their lives being used as pawns
in the dysfunctional internal power games of unaffected “celestials” on Mount
Olympus and Capital Hill. “Like the Homeric gods, power-holders in armies can
create situations that destroy good character and drive mortals mad.”

Shay catalogues the psychological devastation of traumatic
stress on the human psyche and personality.

Trauma takes away our human ability to choose a way
of seeing the world or specific situations in it.

“Much as we expect
effortless control over voluntary physical activities of our bodies— and are
profoundly disturbed by paralysis, involuntary movements, or loss of bladder or
bowel control— so is effortless and confident control over perception, memory,
and thought an essential part of feeling sane. Many veterans who sought help
could only express their affliction by saying things like, “I ain’t right.”

Trauma takes away our ability to remember what we
want to remember and forget what we want to forget.

“Severely traumatized
individuals lose authority over memory. Amnesia is common for traumatic events.
In amnesia the trauma survivor has no authority over his memories of events
because they cannot be recalled at will like ordinary memory. On the contrary,
memory has authority over him.

Trauma takes away our ability to place experience
into memory where it belongs and keep it there.

“Traumatic memory is
not narrative. Rather, it is experience that reoccurs, either as full sensory
replay of traumatic events in dreams or flashbacks, with all things seen,
heard, smelled, and felt intact, or as disconnected fragments. These fragments
may be inexplicable rage, terror, uncontrollable crying, or disconnected body
states and sensations, such as the sensation of suffocating in a Viet Cong
tunnel or being tumbled over and over by a rushing river— but with no memory of
either tunnel or river. In other instances, knowledge of the facts may be
separately preserved without any emotion, meaning, or sensory content. Often
the only clue to a traumatic event may be an utterly bland statement of fact
slipped into another context,

“Such emotion is
relived, not remembered.”

“Once reexperiencing is
under way, the survivor lacks authority to stop it or put it away. The
helplessness associated with the original experience is replayed in the
apparent helplessness to end or modify the reexperience once it has begun.”

Trauma reduces our ability to experience the
present.

“So long as the
traumatic moment persists as a relivable nightmare, consciousness remains fixed
upon it. The experiential quality of reality drains from the here-and-now; the
dead are more real than the living. This is a cognitive aspect of the
detachment of the trauma survivor from his current life and is intimately
connected with the persistence of numbing, one of the basic skills of surviving
prolonged, inescapable terror.”

Trauma makes it difficult to remain concerned about
the people in the world around you and it diminishes one’s sense of efficacy (the
feeling that what you do matters).

“For combat soldiers,
the temporal horizon shrinks as much as the moral and social horizon. Only
getting through now has any existence. With this loss of a meaningful personal
narrative that links past, present, and future comes a shrinkage of volition.
Combat restricts and arrests the personal exercise of will as absolutely as the
harshest imprisonment. A key survival skill in both circumstances is
suppression of the will, which goes hand in hand with suppression of thoughts
of the future. A depleted state of apathy, an inability to want anything, to
will anything, often persists into life after combat, when it is no longer
needed as a survival skill.”

It is here that we move on to treatment of combat
related PTSD. “The essential injuries in combat PTSD are moral and social,”
says Shay,

“and so the central
treatment must be moral and social. The best treatment restores control to the
survivor and actively encourages communalization of the trauma. Healing is done
by survivors, not to survivors.”

Shay argues that the only way to heal (and he believes
healing possible) is to create narratives and to find communities of empathetic
listeners to share them with. Indeed, Homer himself was believed to have had
great powers of healing through story-telling. Shay argues that the primary
function of Greek tragedies was the healing of psychological wounds incurred in
war. He believes that the structuring of personal narratives that bring meaning
to violent traumatic chaos is essentially a communal and individual activity
that our society desperately needs to engage in.

“If at the end of a war story you feel
uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged
from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and
terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first
rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and
uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil….

“Narrative heals personality
changes only if the survivor finds or creates a trustworthy community of
listeners for it. Several traits are required for the audience to be
trustworthy. Some traits relate to strength. The listeners must be strong
enough to hear the story without injury. Combat veterans will never trust a
therapist whom they see to be “freaked out” by what he or she hears. In a
therapy group doing trauma-centered work, the other members of the group must
be strong enough to cope with inevitable triggers to their own memories. The
listeners must also be strong enough to hear the story without having to deny
the reality of the experience or to blame the victim. We are so trained to deny
the soldier’s experience that the normal response to hearing an account of
betrayal is to make all the power-holder’s excuses: This is a figment of your
fantasy; if you knew all the facts, you’d see it was for the best; you’ve got a
hidden agenda in saying this; it never happened; you brought it on yourself;
and anyway, it’s twenty years ago, so forget it and don’t create more problems
now.”

Shay’s prescription is not complicated. It is, as I
said in my introduction to this blog, to listen. “Without emotion in the
listener there is no communalization of the trauma. To achieve trust, listeners
must respect the narrator.”

“We must all strive to
be a trustworthy audience for victims of abuse of power. I like to think that
Aristotle had something like this in mind when he made tragedy the centerpiece
of education for citizens in a democracy.”

“We must create our own
new models of healing which emphasize communalization of the trauma. Combat
veterans and American citizenry should meet together face to face in daylight,
and listen, and watch, and weep, just as citizen-soldiers of ancient Athens did
in the theater at the foot of the Acropolis.”

Question
for Comment: Do you have ways of “communalizing”
your grief when you experience sorrow in life? How?

10/13/2012

In Robert Frost’s poem, Mending Wall, we read of two men who are neighbors, working side by
side but who cannot seem to connect. In Frost’s The Tuft of Flowers, we read of two men who never meet who are
nevertheless, kindred spirits. I finished Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations this morning (I am using the fact that I am teaching
about the Romans and about Immanuel Kant’s Ethics of Duty this week as an
excuse) and I was struck by the similarities between the Emperor Aurelius’
message and the message of the book of Ecclesiastes and the letter of Paul to the
Philippians. Philippians would have been written at least a hundred years before
the MEditations and Ecclesiastes would have been written
hundreds of years before that. They could have never met, but these men share
some common observations about life.

Both the author of Ecclesiastes and the Emperor Aurelius see no point in the pursuit
of fame or reputational immortality. If one needs to know that they will be
remembered forever in order to feel happy in the present, they are wishing for
what cannot be. “How quickly all things disappear,” says Aurelius “--in the
universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them.”

“For the present is the
only thing of which a man can be deprived”

“Throwing away then all
things, hold to these only which are few; and besides, bear in mind that every
man lives only this present time, which is an indivisible point, and that all
the rest of his life is either past or it is uncertain. Short then is the time
which every man lives, and small the nook of the earth where he lives; and
short too the longest posthumous fame, and even this only continued by a
succession of poor human beings, who will very soon die, and who know not even
themselves, much less him who died long ago.”

“How many after being celebrated
by fame have been given up to oblivion; and how many who have celebrated the
fame of others have long been dead.”

“Near is thy
forgetfulness of all things; and near the forgetfulness of thee by all.”

“Short lived are both
the praiser and the praised, and the rememberer and the remembered:”

“Look down from above
on the countless herds of men and their countless solemnities, and the
infinitely varied voyagings in storms and calms, and the differences among
those who are born, who live together, and die. And consider, too, the life
lived by others in olden time, and the life of those who will live after thee,
and the life now lived among barbarous nations, and how many know not even thy
name, and how many will soon forget it, and how they who perhaps now are
praising thee will very soon blame thee, and that neither a posthumous name is
of any value, nor reputation, nor anything else.”

All of these passages remind one of Ecclesiastes 2:15-16.

“The
fate of the fool will overtake me also.
What
then do I gain by being wise?”
I said to myself,
“This
too is meaningless.”
For the wise, like
the fool, will not be long remembered;
the days have already come when both have been forgotten.
Like the fool, the wise too must die!

The writer of Ecclesiastes asserted that it is folly
to think that somehow by pulling harder one can achieve a happiness that people
in former times were unable to achieve by their pulling at the same things. Aurelius
agrees.

“Consider the past,--such
great changes of political supremacies; thou mayest foresee also the things
which will be. For they will certainly be of like form, and it is not possible
that they should deviate from the order of the things which take place now;
accordingly to have contemplated human life for forty years is the same as to
have contemplated it for ten thousand years. For what more wilt thou see?

“Constantly consider
how all things such as they now are, in time past also were; and consider that
they will be the same again. And place before thy eyes entire dramas and stages
of the same form, whatever thou hast learned from thy experience or from older
history; for example, the whole court of Hadrianus, and the whole court of
Antoninus, and the whole court of Philippus, Alexander, Croesus; for all those were
such dramas as we see now, only with different actors.”

The writer of Ecclesiastes asserts that the pursuit
of most things that we think we must have to be happy is a “chasing after the
wind.” Aurelius whole-heartedly agrees.

“He who has seen
present things has seen all, both everything which has taken place from all
eternity and everything which will be for time without end; for all things are
of one kin and of one form.

"As it happens to thee
in the amphitheatre and such places, that the continual sight of the same
things, and the uniformity make the spectacle wearisome, so it is in the whole
of life; for all things above, below, are the same and from the same. How long
then?

“Accordingly, on every
occasion a man should ask himself, Is this one of the unnecessary things?”

Both the author of Ecclesiastes and Aurelius remind
us to consider our mortality.

“Consider when thou art
much vexed or grieved, that man's life is only a moment, and after a short time
we are all laid out dead.”

Both men seem to believe that in the end, the best
life is a life lived as a socially responsible member of a larger community; A
life of philosophy where the appetites are brought into conformity with the
hope of achieving them. “Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the
country, sea-shores, and mountains;” says Aurelius,

“and thou too art wont
to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most
common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire
into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble
does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him
such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect
tranquillity; and I affirm that tranquillity is nothing else than the good
ordering of the mind. Constantly then give to thyself this retreat, and renew
thyself.”

Both men regard it as a mistake to attach one’s
grappling hook into things which cannot satisfy and which can never be held permanently
anyway.

“Consider that before
long thou wilt be nobody and nowhere, nor will any of the things exist which
thou now seest, nor any of those who are now living. For all things are formed
by nature to change and be turned and to perish, in order that other things in
continuous succession may exist. (Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations)

“I
hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them
to the one who comes after me.” (Ecclesiastes)

In a similar way, we can see the Apostle Paul in his
letter to the Philippians making observations very similar to those that Marcus
Aurelius makes (only Paul’s theistic approach allows him to pursue not merely
contentment but indeed, joy). Aurelius
follows the lead of his mentor Epictetus in his insistence that no tragedy can traumatize
the person who is willing and able to discipline his mind to reframe that
tragedy as something besides a tragedy. In Paul’s case, he reframes anything
that might poison his joy. Are his enemies benefitting from his imprisonment?
No matter. The Gospel is being spread. Will he be executed? No matter. It will
further his life’s goals. Will his entrance into heaven be delayed? No matter.
It is an opportunity to serve the church. And so on. As Aurelius advises,

“Take away thy opinion,
and then there is taken away the complaint, "I have been harmed."
Take away the complaint, "I have been harmed," and the harm is taken
away.

“Remember too on every
occasion which leads thee to vexation to apply this principle: not that this is
a misfortune, but that to bear it nobly is good fortune.”

“It is in our power to
have no opinion about a thing, and not to be disturbed in our soul; for things
themselves have no natural power to form our judgments.”

“I can have that
opinion about anything which I ought to have. If I can, why am I disturbed?”

“If thou art pained by
any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own
judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now. But if
anything in thy own disposition gives thee pain, who hinders thee from
correcting thy opinion?”

“It is not men's acts
which disturb us, for those acts have their foundation in men's ruling
principles, but it is our own opinions which disturb us. Take away these opinions
then, and resolve to dismiss thy judgment about an act as if it were something
grievous, and thy anger is gone.”

“Consider that
everything is opinion, and opinion is in thy power. Take away then, when thou
choosest, thy opinion, and like a mariner who has doubled the promontory, thou
wilt find calm, everything stable, and a waveless bay.”

Aurelius, like Paul is a fan of the pursuit of duty
rather than the pursuit of happiness. For both of them, happiness is just a
side effect of the pursuit of duty. Both of them insist on the need for
consistency of focus and the pursuit of one’s mission. One’s calling. “How much trouble he avoids who does not look
to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks,” says Aurelius,

“but only to what he
does himself, that it may be just and pure; or, as Agathon says, look not round
at the depraved morals of others, but run straight along the line without
deviating from it.”

“For thus it is, men of
Athens, in truth: wherever a man has placed himself thinking it the best place
for him, or has been placed by a commander, there in my opinion he ought to
stay and to abide the hazard, taking nothing into the reckoning, either death
or anything else, before the baseness [of deserting his post].

Both Aurelius and Paul take life as it comes to them
as a direct gift of their divinities. “I have learned to be content,” says
Paul. Even if some circumstance is disagreeable to their carnal desires, it is,
they both assert, in some way beneficial to the greater good. “And so accept
everything which happens,” says Aurelius,

“even if it seem
disagreeable, because it leads to this, to the health of the universe and to
the prosperity and felicity of Zeus [the universe]. For he would not have
brought on any man what he has brought, if it were not useful for the whole.”

“Now I want you to know, brothers
and sisters, that what has happened to me has actually served to advance the
gospel,” Paul says in Philippians. Paul intentionally cultivates an attitude of
not caring about what would depress a person to care about. “But what does it
matter?” he asks of those who were rejoicing in his imprisonment, “The
important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true,
Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice.
“Let the wrong which is done by a man stay there where the wrong was done” Marcus
Aurelius argues, noting that “there is no man so fortunate that there shall not
be by him when he is dying some who are pleased with what is going to happen.” “Amen!”
Paul would say.

“And God is faithful,” says Paul in
his letter to the Corinthians,

“who
will not suffer you to be tested above that which you are able: but will make
also with temptation issue, that you may be able to bear
it.”

“Nothing happens to any man which he is not formed
by nature to bear.” Says Marcus Aurelius in refrain.

“Live with the gods.
And he does live with the gods who constantly shows to them that his own soul
is satisfied with that which is assigned to him . . . Let it make no difference to thee whether
thou art cold or warm, if thou art doing thy duty”

“Consider how much more
pain is brought on us by the anger and vexation caused by such acts than by the
acts themselves, at which we are angry and vexed.”

Though Paul is in pursuit of consistent uninterrupted
JOY [capital letters intentional] and Aurelius is simply in pursuit of
tranquility, they share many approaches to their ends. For either, the key is
to allow nothing flawed or transient or inconsistent to play the role of an
essential source of one’s tranquility. Neither are willing to say of things
which are not within one’s control “I must have this.” “Thou art not dissatisfied,
I suppose, because thou weigh only so many litrae and not three hundred,”
writes the emperor,

“Be not dissatisfied
then that thou must live only so many years and not more; for as thou art
satisfied with the amount of substance which has been assigned to thee, so be
content with the time.”

“Wipe out the
imagination. Stop the pulling of the strings. Confine thyself to the present.”

“No joining others in their wailing, no violent
emotion” Aurelius advises in the Meditations.
“But, do not grieve as the
pagan population does,” Paul says, “for we do not grieve as those who have no
hope.” Obviously, Aurelius does not have the certainty of hope in an afterlife
that Paul does and for that reason, Aurelius must content himself with a self-assertion
that death is at very least “not bad” while Paul can claim it as a positive
good. But both are using the power of the human ability to reframe the things
that scare them (or haunt them) to their own emotional ends. If we admit
the existence of a deity, both men argue, we must also admit that that deity
orders all things wisely and well. Paul will make this assertion by pointing to
the crucifixion of Christ – an unmitigated tragedy that Paul says saves us all.
Aurelius must simply assert as if to say “surely, this must be the way it is.”

For Paul, his relationship with Christ is his
artesian well of joy, and no imprisonment, no sickness, no weariness, no
opposition can touch it. “Nothing shall separate me from the love of God,” he
says in Romans. With Christ, he sees no reason to hang on to anything else. “This
is the chief thing: Be not perturbed,” Marcus Aurelius would later remind
himself. “Receive [wealth or prosperity] without arrogance; and be ready to let
it go.” “It’s hard to imagine, the freedom we find in the things we leave
behind” says the Christian singer-songwriter, Michael Card reflecting the
teachings of Paul in the letter to the Philippians.

“What
is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing
Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them
garbage, that I may gain Christ.”

“Therefore
the mind which is free from passions is a citadel,” Aurelius concludes. For the
man who needs not what he might not get and only needs what he cannot loose
suffers no anxiety. With the inflection of Clint Eastwood saying “Make my day,”
he says “Ruffle my feathers. I dare you.” It is not hard to see how he and Paul
are, in some respects at least, "kindred spirits." Did Aurelius ever read Paul?
What would the two of them have said to one another? That might make a fun
project for a creative writing class.

Ancient Greek philosophers had set their disciples
to the task of visualizing and creating perfect societies. When this endeavor
failed, subsequent philosophers stepped in to help their disciples pursue
perfect lives in imperfect worlds. The Stoics were one of those philosophical
groups who made the case that in an imperfect world, the pursuit of the perfect
life entailed the pursuit of a state of equanimity – a state of being
untroubled by all the imperfection around them. Christian teachings took
Stoicism a step further and advocated that we live lives of joy. The Christian
message was that reality entitles us to joy (not merely repose) regardless of temporal
circumstances. The Christian message argued that this imperfect world was
perfecting us and preparing us for a soon and certain coming perfect world
(either heavenly or millennial). The Christian message asserted that power had come into the world to make it more perfect where such perfection was hither-to impossible. Thus, the Christian message constituted an
assault on the thinking of the writer of Ecclesiastes. Where Ecclesiastes
asserted that nothing ever changed, satisfaction never appeared, brokenness never
mended, and searchers never found, the Christian message was the opposite.
Christianity said to the Stoics, “Hope. Desire. Attach. Love. For nothing can
be lost which will not be returned to you either in this life or the next.”

There is a river running through the thoughts of each of these men.

Question
for Comment: Do you think that you spend most of
your psychological life thinking like the writer of Ecclesiastes (in despair),
Marcus Aurelius (in serenity), or Paul (in joy)? Why? Is it a choice? Or are we
born with dispositional viewpoints on life?

10/06/2012

Luke 22:31
How often does one find an Iranian movie set in one’s own neighborhood? Maybe even in one’s own life? A Separation is about the way life sometimes winnows a person, teasing out the hierarchy of our loyalties to those people and principles that we value. People who care about more than one person, or who care about people and also care about abstract principles, like justice, fairness, and truth will inevitably experience this process in life. What do we do when our commitments to our parents conflict with the commitments we have made to our partners or children? What do we do when our desire for the truth or for justice conflicts with our desire for compassion and fiscal responsibility? What do we do when our own self-interest collides with our religious convictions? Etc.

A Separation takes an unfortunate event in the life of a common Iranian family and uses it to show how we are all sometimes fractured into opposing intra-psychic forces. The film takes you through the obstacle course of circumstance that weeds us all out and shows us who we are from time to time. It is a story of good people conflicted.

The film begins in a court of some sort. A couple is making an argument in front of an unseen judge. Samin argues that Nader should leave his Alzhaimers-struck father and emigrate from Iran for the benefit of their daughter Termeh. Nader cannot see anything right about this and accuses his wife of giving up on Iran too easily. In the next scene, we see Samin leaving the home to stay with her parents. She is conflicted between a desire to leave Iran and a desire to stay connected to her adolescent daughter. Soon the ripple effects of her departure are felt on the “family” as Nader must hire someone to come and care for his profoundly needy father. This woman arrives with her young daughter and she too has conflicts of religious and filial loyalty that pit her concern for Nader’s father with her own concerns for her husband and child and faith.

The web of circumstance begins to draw every member of both families, along with their neighbors, teachers, and friends into a variety of pivotal moral decisions. Who would they lie for and why? At what cost will they tell the truth and why? Throughout the film, the young Termeh astutely observes the behavior of the adults in her life, lasering in on their characters as children often do. And in the end, the director leaves her (and us) to face a heart wrenching decision of her own.

I could see myself taking three hours of an Introduction to the Philosophy of Ethics class to watch and discuss this film. It is a script taken from our lives and incarnated with good acting. I could not picture these characters being anything but what they are in this film. And that I suspect is the sign of a good dramatic production.

Question for Comment: How often are you faced with “impossible” choices that pit loyalties and values you hold dear against each other? How do you sort these decisions out?